Year’s Best SF 16 Read online

  YEAR’S

  BEST

  SF 16

  EDITED BY

  DAVID G. HARTWELL

  and KATHRYN CRAMER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Sleeping Dogs by Joe Haldeman

  Castoff World by Kay Kenyon

  Petopia by Benjamin Crowell

  Futures in the Memories Market by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memoirs of Star Captain Y.-T. Lee by Vernor Vinge

  About It by Terry Bisson

  Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra by Vandana Singh

  Under the Moons of Venus by Damien Broderick

  All the Love in the World by Cat Sparks

  At Budokan by Alastair Reynolds

  Graffiti in the Library of Babel by David Langford

  Steadfast Castle by Michael Swanwick

  How to Become a Mars Overlord by Catherynne M. Valente

  To Hie from Far Cilenia by Karl Schroeder

  The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned by Brenda Cooper

  Penumbra by Gregory Benford

  The Good Hand by Robert Reed

  The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt

  Jackie’s-Boy by Steven Popkes

  Eight Miles by Sean McMullen

  Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance by Paul Park

  About the Authors

  Praise

  Edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

  Copyright

  Story Copyrights

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  It was a good year for genre publishing in general, by which we mean that publishers and authors made money. The year 2010 was also one in which electronic books attained a higher level of sales and became a significant force in bestseller publishing. Not so significant in ordinary publishing. Very significant in academic publishing. At present, the electronic market is driven by the sales of reading devices. Science fiction and fantasy, as we know, is not generally bestseller publishing, and so the genre was not in general hurt but helped in the short run. More or less the same number of printed books were sold in the genre, but the number of ebooks increased, and so a bit more money was made because of ebooks. We spent the last decade saying that we make tens of dollars on ebooks, and when it gets to hundreds, we will know. It got to hundreds in 2010, a big jump.

  In some areas other than SF, the ebooks appear to have reduced the number of books sold, especially top bestsellers, compromising their profitability. This is bad news for those publishers who went for the “just publish the bestsellers” line in the last decade or two. And for the authors. And their agents. And for bookstores that rely on the big bestsellers for a hefty percentage of their sales and profits.

  Barnes & Noble solved this problem by selling its own ebook reading device. It is too early to tell as we write, but it appears that the real money in ebooks was made from device sales in 2010, not from the content on them. So it remains an ambiguous moment for the book publishing industry, and for authors and editors and readers. And the Google settlement, which will impact the whole situation profoundly, didn’t happen in 2010—perhaps in 2011 . . .

  As we write in February of 2011, the Borders chain, the third largest retailer of books in the U.S., has declared bankruptcy and is closing stores. Bookselling is generally in dire shape, especially mass market bookselling. People are talking in the usual hyperbolic terms about the death of the mass market book. It is certainly true that average mass market sales are in decline, but it is still too early for the funeral.

  The biggest single chunk of the mass market is women’s romance in various forms, and it appears that that audience is avidly adopting ebooks, especially since it is in general an audience that reads daily, and recycles by donation, trading, or simple disposal most of the mass market books. And ebooks are not a clutter problem. The question is, can much of the mass market industry survive the loss of a significant portion of its current print audience? Probably it can. There are still thrillers and mysteries—for the moment. Millions of paperbacks are still being sold.

  Science fiction magazines once again lost some circulation, and magazines in the mainstream failed in large numbers in 2010. Survivors thus far tend to fulfill specific niches—such as fantasy or science fiction does. Online venues, which might pay contributors but make little money, grew or failed again this year. Non-profit Strange Horizons and Tor.com appeared the most stable of the online bunch. Lightspeed was a new attraction online. Clarkesworld won the Hugo Award for best semiprozine. Lots of the small presses generally carried the ball for innovation in 2010, especially the Bay Area cluster of Night Shade, Tachyon, and Subterranean, and PS Publishing in the UK. There is a whole lot of genre short fiction being published. Steampunk is becoming its own genre, for instance, as alternate history fiction did in the 1990s, only sometimes discernible as science fiction, but there was less genre science fiction in 2010. Analog, for instance, had a stronger-than-average year and no one seemed to notice (we did), so we point it out here. Asimov’s featured a lot of talented newcomers in 2010.

  Science fiction book reviewing seemed in danger of falling completely out of the mainstream in 2010 in the U.S., with not a single major newspaper devoting significant space to it, and fewer-than-ever regional publications covering the new books. Late in the year, Jeff VanderMeer appeared with a review roundup in the New York Times, and then it was announced in January 2011 that Tom Shippey will begin a science fiction and fantasy column in the Wall Street Journal. So there is some hope.

  Otherwise, the mainstream happily and effectively appropriated tropes and images and settings from SF in a lot of literary and commercial novels, which is in general implying that SF is crap but that we can use pieces of it for real literature. That implication is certainly clear to the publishing establishment, though not, of course, to genre publishing and the genre audience, which generally claims any work that uses the furniture of SF to be really part of the genre, and then claims the writer as an SF writer. Ironically, that strengthens the “SF is crap” faction. Watch out for it. The best corrective is intelligent, sympathetic reviewing of genre material by reviewers who can tell the difference between SF and borrowing from SF, and can praise success in either venue appropriately without conflating them. We like some of those mainstream literary successes very much, but they are not successes for the genre, except insofar as letting us know the genre is worth appropriating—which is flattering in its own way.

  There are still four professional print magazines that publish SF (the Hugo rules say there are three, but this is nonsense—Interzone is a professional magazine), and several online venues that pay more than a token for fiction and are in effect professional markets. However, much of the new fiction of high quality is showcased in original anthologies these days, and they are a significant source for this book (five of the stories this year, actually fewer than in recent years, but the point still holds). Only mentioning the SF anthologies, among the best are: Sprawl, edited by Alisa Krasnostein, an Australian small press collection; Is Anybody Out There, edited by Nick Gevers & Marty Halpern; Metatropolis, edited by John Scalzi (originally an audio book, reprinted in trade in 2010); Shine, edited by Jetse De Vries; and Gateways, edited by Betty Ann Hull. We make a lot of additional comments about the writers and the stories, and what’s happening in SF, in the individual introductions accompanying the stories in this book.

  Our Year’s Best SF is an anthology series about what’s going on now in SF. We try in each volume to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to
the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. It is supposed to be fun to read, a special kind of fun you cannot find elsewhere. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2010.

  This book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is fairly clearly that and not something else. It is our opinion that it is a good thing to have genre boundaries. If we didn’t, young writers would probably feel compelled to find something else, perhaps less interesting, to transgress or attack to draw attention to themselves. We have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and slipstream, and postmodern literature. We (Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s Best Fantasy as well, a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy fiction too. But here, we choose science fiction. Welcome to the Year’s Best SF 16.

  David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

  Pleasantville, NY

  Sleeping Dogs

  Joe Haldeman

  Joe Haldeman (home.earthlink.net/~haldeman/) alternates between living in Gainsville, Florida, and the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. He teaches writing seasonally at MIT, where he has been a part-time professor since 1983. His first SF novel, The Forever War, established him as a leading writer of his generation, and his later novels and stories have put him in the front rank of living SF writers. High spots among them include Mindbridge, Worlds, The Hemingway Hoax, 1968, and Forever Peace. His story collections include Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, None So Blind. His collection War Stories appeared in 2005. His most recent book is Starbound (2010), a sequel to his 2008 novel Marsbound. The third book in the trilogy will be Earthbound.

  This story appeared in Gateways, an original anthology of new and reprinted stories in honor of Frederik Pohl, and one of the best anthologies of the year. A former soldier returns to the world rich in dysprosium where he served in combat thirty years before, trying to recapture erased memories. When he recaptures them, he makes a series of surprising, deeply ironic discoveries about himself and his civilization. A lot of them reflect back on our contemporary situation, making this story our choice for first in this book.

  The cab took my eyeprint and the door swung open. I was glad to get out. No driver to care how rough the ride was, on a road that wouldn’t even be called a road on Earth. The place had gone downhill in the thirty years I’d been away.

  Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn’t have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.

  Six identical buildings on the block, half-cylinders of stained pale green plastic. I walked up the dirt path to number three: OFFWORLD AFFAIRS AND CONFEDERACIÓN LIAISON. I almost ran into the door when it didn’t open. Pushed and pulled and it reluctantly let me inside.

  It was a little cooler and less sulfurous. I went to the second door on the right, TRAVEL DOCUMENTS AND PERMISSIONS, and went in.

  “You don’t knock on Earth?” A cadaverous tall man, skin too white and hair too black.

  “Actually, no,” I said, “not public buildings. But I apologize for my ignorance.”

  He looked at a monitor built into his desk. “You would be Flann Spivey, from Japan on Earth. You don’t look Japanese.”

  “I’m Irish,” I said. “I work for a Japanese company, Ichiban Imaging.”

  He touched a word on the screen. “Means ‘number one.’ Best, or first?”

  “Both, I think.”

  “Papers.” I laid out two passports and a folder of travel documents. He spent several minutes inspecting them carefully. Then he slipped them into a primitive scanning machine, which flipped through them one by one, page by page.

  He finally handed them back. “When you were here twenty-nine Earth years ago, there were only eight countries on Seca, representing two competing powers. Now there are seventy-nine countries, two of them offplanet, in a political situation that’s . . . impossible to describe simply. Most of the other seventy-eight countries are more comfortable than Spaceport. Nicer.”

  “So I was told. I’m not here for comfort, though.” There weren’t many planets where they put their spaceports in nice places.

  He nodded slowly as he selected two forms from a drawer. “So what does a ‘thanatopic counselor’ do?”

  “I prepare people for dying.” For living completely, actually, before they leave.

  “Curious.” He smiled. “It pays well?”

  “Adequately.”

  He handed me the forms. “I’ve never seen a poor person come through that door. Take these down the hall to Immunization.”

  “I’ve had all the shots.”

  “All that the Confederación requires. Seca has a couple of special tests for returning veterans. Of the Consolidation War.”

  “Of course. The nanobiota. But I was tested before they let me return to Earth.”

  He shrugged. “Rules. What do you tell them?”

  “Tell?”

  “The people who are going to die. We just sort of let it catch up with us. Avoid it as long as possible, but . . .”

  “That’s a way.” I took the forms. “Not the only way.”

  I had the door partly open when he cleared his throat. “Dr. Spivey? If you don’t have any plans, I would be pleased to have midmeal with you.”

  Interesting. “Sure. I don’t know how long this will take . . .”

  “Ten minims, fifteen. I’ll call us a floater, so we don’t have to endure the road.”

  The blood and saliva samples took less time than filling out the forms. When I went back outside, the floater was humming down and Braz Nitian was watching it land from the walkway.

  It was a fast two-minute hop to the center of town, the last thirty seconds disconcerting free fall. The place he’d chosen was Kaffee Rembrandt, a rough-hewn place with a low ceiling and guttering oil lamps in pursuit of a sixteenth-century ambience, somewhat diluted by the fact that the dozens of Rembrandt reproductions glowed with apparently sourceless illumination.

  A busty waitress in period flounce showed us to a small table, dwarfed by a large self-portrait of the artist posed as “Prodigal Son with a Whore.”

  I’d never seen an actual flagon, a metal container with a hinged top. It appeared to hold enough wine to support a meal and some conversation.

  I ordered a plate of braised vegetables, following conservative dietary advice—the odd proteins in Seca’s animals and fish might lay me low with a xeno-allergy. Among the things I didn’t remember about my previous time here was whether our rations had included any native flesh or fish. But even if I’d safely eaten them thirty years ago, the Hartford doctor said, I could have a protein allergy now, since an older digestive system might not completely break down those alien proteins into safe amino acids.

  Braz had gone to college on Earth, UCLA, an expensive proposition that obligated him to work for the government for ten years (which would be fourteen Earth years). He had degrees in mathematics and macroeconomics, neither of which he used in his office job. He taught three nights a week and wrote papers that nine or ten people read and disagreed with.

  “So how did you become a thanatopic counselor? Something you always wanted to be when you grew up?”

  “Yeah, after cowboy and pirate.”

  He smiled. “I never saw a cowboy on Earth.”

  “Pirates tracked them down and made them walk the plank. Actually, I was an accountant when I joined the military, and then started out in pre-med after I was discharged, but switched over to psychology and moved into studying veterans.”

  “Natural enough. Know thyself.”

  “Literally.” Find thyself, I thought. “You get a lot of us coming through?”

  “Well, not so many, not from Earth or other
foreign planets. Being a veteran doesn’t correlate well with wealth.”

  “That’s for sure.” And a trip from Earth to Seca and back costs as much as a big house.

  “I imagine that treating veterans doesn’t generate a lot of money, either.” Eyebrows lifting.

  “A life of crime does.” I smiled and he laughed politely. “But most of the veterans I do see are well off. Almost nobody with a normal life span needs my services. They’re mostly for people who’ve lived some centuries, and you couldn’t do that without wealth.”

  “They get tired of life?”

  “Not the way you or I could become tired of a game, or a relationship. It’s something deeper than running out of novelty. People with that little imagination don’t need me. They can stop existing for the price of a bullet or a rope—or a painless prescription, where I come from.”

  “Not legal here,” he said neutrally.

  “I know. I’m not enthusiastic about it, myself.”

  “You’d have more customers?”

  I shrugged. “You never know.” The waitress brought us our first plates, grilled fungi on a stick for me. Braz had a bowl of small animals with tails, deep-fried. Finger food; you hold them by the tail and dip them into a pungent yellow sauce.

  It was much better than I’d expected; the fungi were threaded onto a stick of some aromatic wood like laurel; she brought a small glass of a lavender-colored drink, tasting like dry sherry, to go with them.

  “So it’s not about getting bored?” he asked. “That’s how you normally see it. In books, on the cube . . .”

  “Maybe the reality isn’t dramatic enough. Or too complicated to tell as a simple drama.

  “You live a few hundred years, at least on Earth, you slowly leave your native culture behind. You’re an immortal— culturally true if not literally—and your nonimmortal friends and family and business associates die off. The longer you live, the deeper you go into the immortal community.”